Scent of a Mom and Dad's Christmases too

In my pre-retirement days of riding the bus downtown to work and back home five days a week, moving from one crowd of people to another, I’d pick up on a lot of smells, not necessarily bad. 

I bet that man with the paper smokes a pipe.  The young man beside me had bacon for breakfast.

On the way home, it would happen again.  This girl had pizza for lunch.  That man with the ruddy cheeks sure smells like beer!

My beautiful Mom, 1971

And every once in awhile, not very often, a woman would pass by and I’d know right away if she smoked a very light menthol cigarette like Silva Thins (what my mom smoked) or wore Jovan Musk (Mom’s perfume). 

And then every once in a GREAT while, I’d be on Fifth Avenue or entering an elevator or exiting a revolving door, and I’d literally stop in my tracks and feel my heart leap into my throat. 

Ivory soap, Colgate toothpaste.  The faintest whiff of menthol & tobacco.  Jovan Musk.  That’s her, that’s Mom.

I’d always look around to see who it was.  Not that I planned on confronting them to ask what they were wearing or smoking, but if I didn’t see anyone likely to carry this combination of scents, I’d wonder to myself if that was Mom letting me know she was still here, watching over me and my brothers & sisters. 

In another week it will be the 16th anniversary of Mom’s passing; she died December 22, 2004.  Sometimes I wonder how we’ve gotten this far along without her.  Love & miss you, Mom.

I shared all of that, because of something that happened this weekend that made me want to laugh & cry.  Since I’ve recently been baking with Pillsbury’s “Poppin Fresh” dough, on Saturday I tried a can of cinnamon rolls with orange icing.

After I took them out of the oven and iced them, I got my coffee started, then went to the bathroom to wash up before having breakfast. 

As I stood there washing my face, my furnace kicked on and the smells of coffee, rolls, cinammon & oranges wafted thru my ceiling’s vent.

It was just the right combination of aromas that whisked me back to our farmhouse kitchen at Christmas time, when Grandma came and stayed with us, bringing her freshly baked pies and bread.  And like most Christmas Eves our first years there, while Grandma sat at our kitchen table and talked to Mom and us kids (drinking her coffee and smoking her Salems), my dad would come clumping up the basement steps into our kitchen, hefting a sack of oranges. 

Mom always said the same thing:  “Don look how much food we have in here, the last thing we need are all these oranges!”  While Grandma laughed, Mom would say to her “Every Christmas it’s like we’re back in the Great Depression and oranges are a once-a-year thing!”

Dad would say something funny in a Southern drawl like “You don’t want these kids gettin’ scurvy, do ya Mizz Linda?”

We’d all be laughing then, while Dad reminded us his childhood Christmases were a new pair of gloves or wool socks or cap and a big orange, a real holiday treat in those days (when citrus wasn’t a staple in markets year-round; at least not in Pennsylvania).

So in turn, for me at least, it didn’t seem like Christmas until Grandma Morris was in our house, surrounded by goodies and us, and a big bowl of Dad’s oranges smack-dab in the center of things.

All those memories from a warm plate of orange cinnamon rolls!

 

Dad & his mom, Grandma Morris, Christmas morning 1970